OBAMACARE CATASTROPHE: 30,000 ILLINOIS CUSTOMERS TOLD TO START OVER ON HEALTH INSURANCE



By: John Hayward
12/19/2013 11:45 AM

Wow. Just… wow. Ladies and gentlemen, I once again invite you to give a round of applause to the best and brightest in our Ruling Class, the filthy rich bureaucrats whose lifetime of faculty-lounge socialism makes them better qualified to run every business in America than the people who own it. From Fox News:
Illinois officials are emailing and calling thousands of people, advising them to start over on their health insurance applications if they believe the federal government mistakenly referred them to Medicaid.
The latest wrinkle in the troubled enrollment process for the nation’s new health insurance system was announced Wednesday, just days ahead of a key enrollment deadline.
The federal HealthCare.gov website received more than 30,000 applications from Illinoisans who may be eligible for Medicaid, the government health program for the poor. That federal site has been plagued by glitches that now are mostly fixed.
Those 30,000 applications are the ones in question. Some Illinois residents who were referred to Medicaid believe they were incorrectly denied private health coverage, said Illinois Department of Insurance spokesman Mike Claffey.
What’s the problem? Medicaid is awesome, and it can handle an infinite number of new beneficiaries, which is why Team Obama disguised their plans to blast Medicaid into orbit as a completely voluntary “health care reform” plan (if you like your old coverage, you can keep it, PERIOD!) that would make private sector insurance cheaper for everyone.
The Left wants as many people as possible on cradle-to-grave welfare. But alas, there are still those pesky eligibility requirements to satisfy, and if ObamaFail.com sends you to Medicaid but you’re not actually eligible, you’re left high and dry. Also, it seems like some people still have pesky vestigial pangs of pride and independence that make them unwilling to enter a welfare program, when they’re capable of covering their own needs. Go figure.
Well, this seems like the sort of thing that shouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience to work out, with a full eight working days left until the end of the year, and onlythree before the cutoff date for getting covered effective January 1. Luckily, our government was able to threaten insurance companies into moving payment deadlines back into January and accepting retroactive payment for coverage. (And the Administration did explicitly threaten their Little Partners. They told gullible media outlets that it was just a polite request, but Health and Human Services publications said they would consider compliance with this “request” when deciding which insurance companies to kick off the exchanges. You are not allowed to use the correct name for this system of politically-controlled, privately-owned industry.)
The directions for those 30,000 misdirected Illinois residents are the usual clumsy clusterfark that we’ve come to associated with the greatest example of government incompetence in the modern era:
Illinois officials said anyone who believes they were referred to Medicaid by mistake should start again at the Get Covered Illinois online screening tool. That’s a state-run website that asks simple questions and sends users either to Medicaid or the health insurance marketplace.
Officials say if the screener sends them to HealthCare.gov, they should create a new account with a different email address and submit a new application. If the screener refers them to the state’s Medicaid site, they can submit an application there.
Considering the performance of Trainwreck.gov to date, you have my sympathies, people of Illinois. Especially those of you who were smart enough to vote against this. But then, you didn’t really have anything to say about it, because Chicago. Just wait until this whole scheme collapses, as it was designed to – just not this quickly! – and the same ideology controls your health care, not just your health insurance. Imagine how much fun it will be, when some socialist bureaucrat messes up your paperwork and sends you into the wrong operating room.
It’s always been worth remembering that every data processing problem can be solved, eventually, with enough time and money invested. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK to launch a criminally underpowered, insecure, corrupt system and make the American people suffer for a few months while the bugs are hammered out. And it matters whenthe stuff you should have done before Launch Day finally gets done. There are real deadlines to meet, and Barack Obama was profoundly derelict in his duties to allow the launch of a system that could not meet them. It was his job to stop this, not lie and dissemble to protect it from scrutiny and thwart the people who did try to stop it.
The amount of time, anguish, and cold hard cash the defunding caucus would have saved the American people, if they had succeeded, is growing to incalculable proportions. We’ll soon be told we’re not allowed to discuss the lives they would have saved.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/12/1...lth-insurance/